Today is the Vancouver Sun's Raise-A-Reader Day. For those of you scoring at home, the Vancouver Sun is British Columbia's alleged paper of record, and a division of the Asper family's Canwest Global media empire. The Sun says that the Raise-A-Reader promotion, where local celebrities appear at high traffic locations and hand out free newspapers, is intended to promote literacy. This page says it's more like Raise-A-Readership, and I don't care which Sedin twin handed you the Sun, dumping free copies is an quick and dirty way to boost circulation figures for a broadsheet in decline, a tactic Canwest has employed since your local University campus was insulated with complimentary editions of the National Post.
Parents who are concerned for the children's reading ability should also be way of what kind of 'literacy' the Sun is trying to promote. The Sun wants your children to read how accepting a discount on a deck for Premier Clark's house was serious government corruption, but Gordon Campbell ripping up legally binding contracts wasn't. Sun readers were also told that moving shipbuilding jobs to Germany was a good idea because once upon a time, some waterfront mansions on Bowen Island were almost splashed by a Fast Ferry made by those evil union workers right here in B.C. The Green Party is a left-wing replacement for the NDP, even if a growing element of their membership has a bigger hate-on for organized labour than the Liberals do. Real Estate developers and the free market will solve Vancouver's Homeless problem. Seriously, one can find much better fairy tales than these ones.
For those of you just starting out on the path to literacy, this page will summarize: See Dick. See Dick write. See Dick write corporate propaganda for his boss. See Dick's boss call it journalism. What a Dick!
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